Why cry in the sun when you can sulk in the pool? For the second year running, Zodiac Film Club brings you a programme of summer-set films with a dark side. Escape 2026’s spate of increasingly alarming heatwaves and dive with us into the blue, melancholy depths of sad swimming pool cinema.

Crime writer Sarah Morton has grown bored of her fictional detective but is struggling to find new inspiration. Accepting her publisher’s offer of his country house in the South of France, she finds her creative process disrupted by the arrival of his hedonistic daughter, Julie, whose late nights and string of lovers disturb the repressed, introverted Sarah.

François Ozon's Swimming Pool is the ultimate film about a writer in desperate need of a room of one's own… and what happens when that room comes with an uninvited guest. Nodding to iconic pool movies while diving deep into the dark discipline of creativity, it’s one of cinema’s most exquisite ruined vacations.